only enlarged his horizon a little; but he never thought to ask
himself or his father how to deal with the moral problem that
deduced George Washington from the sum of all wickedness. In
practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily
set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man;
but any attempt to deal with them seriously as education is
fatal. Luckily Charles Francis Adams never preached and was
singularly free from cant. He may have had views of his own, but
he let his son Henry satisfy himself with the simple elementary
fact that George Washington stood alone.

Life was not yet complicated. Every problem had a solution,
even the negro. The boy went back to Boston more political than
ever, and his politics were no longer so modern as the eighteenth
century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth. Slavery drove
the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism. The boy
thought as dogmatically as though he were one of his own
ancestors. The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and
Roman popes. Education could go no further in that course, and
ran off into emotion; but, as the boy gradually found his
surroundings change, and felt himself no longer an isolated atom
in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of
moving fish, he began to learn the first and easier lessons of
practical politics. Thus far he had seen nothing but
eighteenth-century statesmanship. America and he began, at the
same time, to become aware of a new force under the innocent
surface of party machinery. Even at that early moment, a rather
slow boy felt dimly conscious that he might meet some personal
difficulties in trying to reconcile sixteenth-century principles
and eighteenth-century statesmanship with late nineteenth-century